Marvin Bell

The Book of the Dead Man (#59)


1.  About the Dead Man's Deathstyle


The dead man practices a healthy deathstyle.
Oh, who now can forestall the dead man's imminent passing?
What with every little thing, the dead man sits atop a system too gone in the gut to go on.
Now is the dead man's time to be ransacked.
Hard materialism reveals the elastic character of reincarnation: either the universe is finite, so nothing is ever lost,
        or the universe is infinite, so nothing is ever lost.
It appears to the dead man that not to be is still to be, yonder and hence.
Excuse me, whispers the dead man, elbowing past like a penitent in Zen vaudeville.
Forgive me, whispers the dead man, rehearsing an apology for your imminent long memory.


2.  More About the Dead Man's Deathstyle


The dead man will last, but not for the usual reasons.
In the circumspect annals of the dead man, no dead weight, no interlude that does not assert its count, no residue that
        does not rise to embody,
no line on the oscilloscope that does not jump for joy.
The dead man has been there, and he's been here, and he likes it here.
Thawed blood flows back into numbed limbs.
A jumpy pulse increasingly interrupts the horizontal.
The brain's whirligig, each organ collects or refuses according to its purpose, each sensory aperture widens to receive
        the stimuli put on hold.
The dead man is shapely to surrender, trim to relinquish, tidy for the final presentation.
Let the grass flagellate the earth, still the dead man lingers.
Let the wind tug the hair shirt of the burial site, the dead man tarries.
Let the sky bend to see what gives, still the dead man does not give ground all at once.
The dead man cannot be done with, for his register and chronicle, his yarns and recitals, his rosters of lives shall be
        obsessively and incautiously annotated.
It is the dead man's way, for his penchant and proclivity have made of the green reed a whistle on which to solo